'The Annoying Hiatus'

The best-known and least interesting portion of A.J. Liebling’s sprawling body of work for The New Yorker is “The Wayward Pressman,” the occasional column of newspaper criticism he wrote between 1945 and his death in 1963. No one loved and hated newspapers as much as Liebling. His appetite for them was another expression of his gluttony. As a newspaper reporter, I shared his insatiability for several decades, then lost interest. Liebling never did.

I’ve read all of Liebling, some of it many times (Between Meals: An Appetite for Paris), but the lede to his press column in the March 28, 1953 issue of The New Yorker, “Death on the One Hand,” may be his finest single sentence:

“Inconsiderate to the last, Josef Stalin, a man who never had to meet a deadline, had the bad taste to die in installments.”

Liebling treats the Soviet despot with the same condescending contempt with which he treated press barons (publishers don’t have deadlines to meet; reporters do, every day). Like any good journalist, Liebling was a cynic with a clandestinely sentimental heart. He could love newspapers while hating editors and publishers. His lede continues:

“This posed a problem for newspaper editors, who had to decide whether to use their prepared obituary notices and shoot the works generally on Wednesday, March 4, the day Tass, the Russian new agency, announced that the premier had suffered a brain hemorrhage, which even to the most casual reader looked like the end, or to wait until he officially expired, by which time the story might have lost the charm of intimacy.”

Newspapers routinely prepare stock obits of prominent people. When he or she dies, all the “B matter” is ready and you slap a fresh lede on the top. Outsiders may find the practice a little ghoulish but it saves time. In Stalin’s case, Soviet officials were afraid to announce the dictator’s death prematurely, and they were worried about the subsequent power struggles that would inevitably take place. Liebling captures the confusion in Moscow and in the U.S.:

“The annoying hiatus that the old Bolshevik permitted to intervene between his syncope and his demise put a strain on even the ruggedest professional seers, who had to start explaining the significance before he actually died and then keep on inventing exegeses until he was in his tomb. Altogether, their ordeal lasted a full week, but they stood it better than their readers.”  

Stalin, we now know, died on this date, March 5, in 1953, and not soon enough.